Landscape design

Urban design

On your bike, with the Eco Helmet

The winner of the James Dyson Award is a low-cost helmet for cyclists: made of honeycomb-core cardboard, it takes up very little space but is ultra-resistant.

Bike-sharing is an ever more popular service in smart cities around the world, from Hangzhou to Paris, and from Brussels to Barcelona. But how do you ensure the safety of its users, without obliging them to carry a cumbersome protective helmet around with them? This was the problem New York designer Isis Shiffer clearly wanted to solve when cycling around the city, and the brilliant idea she came up with has now won the James Dyson Award 2016.

When folded up, the Eco Helmet is not much bigger than a headband, but has a honeycomb structure that opens up concertina fashion (like those paper Christmas decorations), to become an actual crash helmet. The nature of the material from which it is made means that it will adapt to heads of different shapes and sizes, and effectively absorb impact stress in the event of an accident. Shiffer thinks this smart, low-cost product should be supplied as part of bike-sharing schemes: docking stations would be equipped with an automatic distributor of the helmets so that users of the service can cycle safely around the city at little cost (and causing zero pollution), with a design item they can simply pop into their pocket. Thanks to the 30,000 dollar prize money, the idea is now becoming a reality and the product should soon appear on the market.

When folded up, the Eco Helmet by Isis Shiffer is not much bigger than a headband, but has a honeycomb structure that opens up concertina fashion (like those paper Christmas decorations), to become an actual crash helmet. (Courtesy Eco Helmet)

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17 October 2016

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